


ouroboros, the eternal return

by arianrhod



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:09:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arianrhod/pseuds/arianrhod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the troubled with getting drugged is sometimes you forget when you are</p>
            </blockquote>





	ouroboros, the eternal return

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Devilc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Devilc/gifts).



> hopefully this fic isn't too much of a disappointment, it's my first yuletide and thus offered up nervously, trying capture some sense of "the future is the past, the past is the future" that is Derek's life, from the awesome music video you recc'd
> 
> warnings for violence, drugging, swearing, and poor attempts at nonlinear narrative
> 
> definition (and spelling) of ouroboros liberally scooped from Wikipedia

The door closes with a dull thud over the sound of John's sob. There are men (machines? human machines?) in uniform, an insignia on the shoulder swimming into Derek's mind and out again, a black ski mask, hands covered in gloves, covered in blood. They punch John. 

They inject Derek first, before the punching starts. _Stay down_ , they say. The air congeals, sits heavy and sloppy on his bones. The floor slowly rotates, tilts. Derek might slide off.

That’s gonna hurt.

They inject Derek first, then hurt his brother. Derek can’t move, can’t shift off of his arms pinned in cuffs underneath him, but he tries. Across the floor, Kyle swivels his neck to meet Derek's gaze. _Stay down, Derek._ Kyle is grinning at Derek through the haze, teeth covered in blood. Derek cannot blink.

They extend John’s foot at the ankle and stomp on it until he screams. They repeat with his other foot and he does not. They inject Derek again and John says _stop it, stop it._

“Stop it,” Derek says. They wrench Kyle up by the shoulder, until it comes loose with a scream. “Stop it.”

The door closes behind the machine.

Derek surfaces, breathes. 

Their unit has been dispatched to raid a probable machine armory. Dusk swallows them as they speed, at a crouch, through the shelled remains of a strip mall. Nothing has been repurposed here but left to gray into the fading light with the rest of them. Derek sets operational base at the south entrance, in what may have been a bathroom, and sends Kyle ahead. Advanced scout. "Tell us what you see when you see it," Derek orders. The rest of the men settle in to wait.

A single set of footsteps plods softly away. Time is set in the controlled breathing of the other men, weight shifting, bodies relaxed into readiness. _Well these would be useful if we weren't born with arms,_ Kyle jokes over the radio.

How could he be so stupid.

 _I'm just going to the bathroom._ John tells him, rolling his eyes and huffing an annoyed sigh simultaneously. What the kid may have missed of normal teenage experience he makes up for with his attitude. Derek rolls his eyes too. Not the first attitude Derek has been on the receiving end of.

"Because that place is full of computers and your mom is gonna eat me for dinner if I let you go in there on your own," Derek explains, eyeing the Best Buy from the car. A family with four rampaging children pass in front of their car in the parking lot. John glares at him. "Okay, go ahead. I'll catch up.”

“Don't touch anything."

He shouts it over the radio while the unit is jumping to action. Fuck let the idiot kid not be stupid enough to touch anything. He and the men are across the parking lot in seconds, dodging irregularly over torn up ground. Almost dark enough to need night vision, not that they have it, as they sweep through the entryway of an emptied auto repair shop. Bodies dodge through the dark. Too many people between him and Kyle.

People crowd across the entryway of the store. Derek is neither familiar with nor relaxed in crowds; he’s used to crowding, crowded corridors, crowded barracks, but not _crowds_. In this time, there are more people, and they are all over the goddamn place, and everything you need or do not need illuminated with too much light across a maze of a sales floor. He is clearly making these people nervous standing at the door and glaring though, so he tries to dodge his way to the bathroom. He can't see John, there is too ground to cover between him and John.

He sees movement towards the back.

This is a machine shop. Kyle wasn't kidding about arms, and not the kind they need, but row upon row of _arms_ , human shapes made in metal for killing humans. Derek has seen them plunged to the elbow through a man's chest, seen them separated from their body crawling across a battle field. There are other parts; struts, gears, hydraulic mechanisms, a maze of rows and crates and racks extending into the dark. Too much ground to cover between him and Kyle, who is still moving farther away.

"Kyle, stop," Derek shouts, "Stop!" He swears. Never gonna send the kid out ahead if he's not gonna listen to orders. But his brother keeps moving back and back before they can get to him, looking for what is so obviously missing. The chips and the heads.

He has a sightline to the men's bathroom before he's anywhere near enough. John is waiting for him but his eyes focus off down a back hallway next to him, an unmarked metal door set back from the lights and the people that Derek is still fighting his way through, bogged down, heavy in his bones. John starts moving before Derek can get to him.

"Stop. Shit, kid, stop!" Derek swears, and starts to run. Never gonna let this kid go ahead of him again.

It is exactly what he expects it to be.

One computer in a dark empty room. Setting code to a chip to be a killer of men. Echoes of their boots on a bare metal floor. Derek catches up to him at last. There are others here who turn from their work--humans? machines? human machines? Derek cannot spare time for consideration. Derek will accept the blame for this, now and in the future, but he does not stop moving forward.

"Run," he says to his men, who are his men because they retreat immediately at a word. He reaches Kyle, who has frozen. First time seeing the machines make more machines, he has the look of a man about to open fire with thought only for destruction, not being destroyed. "Run, run," Derek gasps at him, pulling his sleeve. Derek has to keep him alive; he has to keep everyone alive.

"Run, run," Derek gasps, but John never listens. John stares at the computer, and the men, or machines, or human machines, that turn from their work to consider the intruders. He has the look of a man who wants to open fire without thought to being destroyed. Derek has to keep him alive, to keep everyone alive.

They don't make it to the door.

They crush both of Kyle's wrists before they wrap cuffs around them as he screams. Derek struggles against the hands that hold him, gets a crunching blow to the ribs for his trouble. They set a knife against John's throat, and another shoves the muzzle of a gun in his mouth as he cries. _Stand down, or we kill your brother,_ they say. Derek struggles, and gets a needle in the meat of his arm. And another, and another.

Derek sinks, drowns.

Noise from outside the room; more soldiers, or more fighting. A rescue, or they've already been rescued. _Sounds like the cavalry,_ Kyle says. _Sounds like someone new,_ John says. Derek disagrees. He is always behind, and too late. There will be no rescue.

The door opens.

Footsteps pound towards them, soft and solid. Someone is leaning over Kyle. A soldier, his brother. Someone is leaning over Derek, hands on him. An impossible outcome; risking soldiers to rescue soldiers is not protocol. Do not expend the commando units on humans while the machines remain. "This isn't how this usually goes," Derek says. Derek should know, rescuing family is his job. _We mean a lot to him. I mean-- he said-- _Kyle says to him as he is propped up, as their cuffs are removed.__

_If we could just get these off. _John says. He is looking at the ceiling, shoulders shifting, blood rolling down his neck. Derek watches. The cuffs rattle against the ground, and then a shriek of metal. Light floods the room. John rolls his head towards the noise. Derek can't focus his eyes, point them at the door, where the door used to be. It is an army of men, or two women, who run through. It is an army, or it is his family. He squints. He blinks.__

"This happened before," Derek says out loud. His voice grinds and he coughs, to a stabbing pain in his chest. A warning that there is something wrong, deeper inside. His cuffs are gone. "You're why they came to rescue us."

Sarah is wiping the hair back from John's forehead, hands on her son, searching, reassuring. Cameron looks down at Derek. A human, a human machine. An impossible outcome. 

John smiles at him from across the floor, wolfish, bloody-toothed.

 _Not yet,_ he says.


End file.
